The ‘stuff’ of 

Tristram Shandy

Article written John Mullan

by:
Themes: Rise of the novel, Satire and humour, Language and ideas
Published: 21 Jun 2018
Dashes, loops, wiggles and blanks: John Mullan investigates the visual oddities of Laurence
Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
The first readers of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy knew that they were reading a
novel like no other. Its originality was not just a matter of how it told its story; it was also a
matter of how it looked. Its author, Laurence Sterne, took very great care over the physical
appearance of his book. His surviving letters to his publishers are stringent in their demands
about paper quality, print type and layout. Even though he had to travel from his Yorkshire home
to do so, he supervised in person the printing of each successive volume. He made sure that the
narrative’s pleasures and puzzles were for the eye as well as for the mind.

Dashes

The experience of reading almost any page of Tristram Shandy involves encountering the
expressive effects of print. The novel has become notorious for its extraordinary pictographic
devices, but the visual trickery is there in almost any paragraph of its prose. Essential to the
narrative is Sterne’s idiosyncratic system of punctuation, and especially his use of dashes. These
vary considerably in length, but are almost always much longer than the dashes in other printed
texts of this (or any other) period. Every page of the novel splits up its sentences with these
dashes, reaching out from one thought to the next. On the one hand, they separate clauses, giving
the impression of a narrator who is always improvising, pausing for a moment before he decides
what to say next. On the other hand, they often seem to race across the page, enacting the speedy
life of that improvisation.

The dashes produce other effects too. In the fourth chapter of the novel, Tristram tells us just
how he knows the precise date of his conception. He tells the reader who is incurious about such
details to ‘skip over the remaining part of this Chapter’, while he seems to take aside the curious
reader for a confidential explanation. Two long dashes split the page, either side of the phrase
‘Shut the door’. It is as if the reader sees on the page the closing off of this narrative space from
what has preceded it. The longest dashes in the novel are found at the beginning of Volume 4,
Chapter XXVII, which does not so much describe as depict the response of the eminent
clergyman Phutatorius when an extremely hot chestnut drops into his breeches. ‘ZOUNDS!’ is
his blasphemous exclamation (though in more emphatic capital letters than this) – which is
followed by a dash that fills the rest of the line and the following two lines. It is a typographic
equivalent to the loudness and length of his agonised exclamation.

‘He flew like lightning – there was a slope of three miles and a half – we scarce touched the
ground – the motion was most rapid – most impetuous’: here, the succession of dashes help to
convey the speed at which Tristram is travelling in a horse-drawn coach (from Volume 5).
The black page

Everywhere, the appearance of the text matches its content. Halfway through the first volume
Tristram narrates the dying moments of Parson Yorick, with his close friend Eugenius taking his
‘last farewell’ of him. The chapter ends with Tristram telling us that Yorick now lies buried in
the churchyard of his own parish, with only the epitaph from Hamlet – ‘Alas, poor YORICK!’
(5.1.184) – on his grave. The comic aspect of the pathos was emphasised by the famous words
being printed in an oblong box, isolated in the middle of the page, as if in imitation of the ‘plain
marble slab’ under which he was buried. The reader learns that many a passer-by stops to read
the inscription, sighing aloud those words. As the chapter sadly and reflectively ends, the reader
sees something else. The facing page is entirely black. So is its reverse side. The novel has gone
into mourning it would seem. Yet the mourning is also a visual joke, in tune with the way that
death always mixes with comedy in Sterne’s book. No wonder that Sterne named the fictional
clergyman with whom he had so much in common ‘Yorick’, after the dead jester of
Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Illustrations

Via Tristram, Sterne makes much play with the language of art criticism and references to visual
art. It often makes pictures of its scenes. Appropriately, therefore, it was one of very few 18th-
century novels that came with professionally produced illustrations. Partly by flattering Hogarth
in the novel, he obtained from the artist a frontispiece for the second edition of the first two
volumes, published in March 1760. It depicted Corporal Trim reading Yorick’s sermon (which
was actually one of Sterne’s own sermons) to Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby, while Dr Slop,
the man-midwife, sleeps in a chair. Tristram, of course, is being born upstairs. A year later
Hogarth also supplied a frontispiece for Volumes 3 and 4 of the novel, which showed a half-
dressed Walter Shandy arriving just in time to prevent the botched christening of his son, who
has been given the ill-omened name Tristram instead of the magnificent ‘Trismegistus’ that he
intended.

Straight and wiggling lines

To visualise is, literally, to see the absurdity of human pretensions. So this is a book that
provides its own self-mocking diagrams of itself. In Volume 6, Chapter X, Tristram, as if
regretting his own tendency to digress, foresees getting on with ‘my uncle Toby’s story, and my
own, in a tolerable straight line’. Seizing on his own metaphor, he then draws the anything-but-
straight lines that might represent the progress of his narrative – often backwards or sideways or
roundabout – in the previous five volumes. And there, in front of the reader, are the five
wiggling, winding, roaming lines on the page. Of course the ideal of a narrative as a straight line
is offered in jest. ‘The best line! say cabbage-planters’.

A torn-out chapter
We are made to see how the business of shaping the narrative relies on the materiality of the
pages in front of us. In Volume 4 the novel leaps straight from Chapter XXIII to Chapter XXV,
at the opening of which Tristram confesses that ‘there is a whole chapter wanting here – and a
chasm of ten pages made in the book by it’. Tristram has torn out a chapter, judging it ‘so much
above the stile and manner of any thing else I have been able to paint in this book’ that the rest
of the book would suffer by it. In the first edition this meant that the remaining right-hand pages
of the volume were (as they never are in a normal book) evenly numbered. The effect must have
been radically disruptive of readerly expectations, though it is never replicated in modern
editions, which number their pages as though nothing untoward has happened.

Widow Wadman: ‘paint her to your own mind – as like your mistress as you can’

The visual jokes go on. When Tristram finally, after many a promise and hint, gets to tell us
about the ‘concupiscible’ Widow Wadman in Volume 6, he thinks of a new way of representing
her allure as vividly as possible to the reader. For the purposes of his trick, he imagines the
reader to be male (just as, where convenient, he elsewhere imagines the reader to be female), and
invites him to take pen and ink and

paint her to your own mind – as like your mistress as you can –as unlike your wife as your
conscience will let you – ’tis all one to me – please but your own fancy in it.

And there is the paper that the reader can use, for the facing page has been left entirely blank, as
the screen for his libidinous imagination.

The blank page which is inserted after Tristram invites the reader to ‘paint [Widow Wadman] to
your own mind – as like your mistress as you can – as unlike your wife as your conscience will
let you’.

In Volume 9, two chapter headings – Chapter XVIII and Chapter XIX – introduce further blank
pages, just at the stage where Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim enter Widow Wadman’s lair. The
next text that is relevant to this episode comes in Chapter XXX where, after several lines of
asterisks (what is being said here?) Toby promises the Widow that she ‘shall see the very place’.
It is five chapters later before we find out what those blank pages were doing: where he was
wounded (in the groin). It is telling that many of the book’s visual tricks involve ‘missing’
material. These include the many lines or paragraphs of asterisks where Tristram tactfully or
insinuatingly omits what should not be said. This is a novel much concerned with the kinds of
meaning – whether innuendo or heightened emotion – that lie beyond words. Gesturing at what
cannot be said was Sterne’s delight.

The looping line

Perhaps the most audacious instance of this was the pictographic device reserved for the final
volume of the novel, where Trim’s flourish with his stick is illustrated – indeed, enacted – by a
famous looping line. Uncle Toby and Trim have paused before Widow Wadman’s front door,
musing on the consequence of knocking and being admitted (the first step to being drawn into
marrying the alluring Mrs Wadman). Sterne paid five shillings for the woodcut needed to
produce this. ‘“Whilst a man is free …”’. The line illustrates freedom and is itself an expressive
freedom. Uncle Toby may be bamboozled by words, but he understands the gesture. ‘A thousand
of my father’s most subtle syllogisms could not have said more for celibacy’. Giddily, the line
has all the freedom and verve that words lack.

These devices and designs and visual inventions are essential to the novel. Tristram even tells us
that one of the visual devices is the ‘motley emblem of my work’. In between Chapters XXXVI
and XXXVII of Volume 3 is a double-sided marbled page. In the first edition of the novel, each
of these pages was marbled by hand before being stuck in to an individual copy of the book, a
laborious and therefore expensive process that included hand-stamping of the page numbers. In
modern paperback editions of Tristram Shandy the marbled page is both monochrome (as
opposed to the vividly crowded colours of the original) and uniform (every copy of a Penguin
Classics version has the same marbled page, photographically copied from an 18th-century
original). Thereby we lose the point, which is that each of its first readers looked at a completely
unique design. The reader might think that he or she is reading the same book as everyone else,
but in fact his or her novel is singular. As readers, we make our own meanings out of the best
kinds of fiction. Look and see.